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The Australian Small Business Blog

Friday, July 31, 2015

Scam Alert: Online Technologies

From time-to-time, I provide alerts to scams that may affect small business, this one from OnlineTech. There are two aspects to this scam, their service and their billing practices. This is what they do.

Firstly they claim to send industry relevant leads to your website for around 5 cents a lead. Sounds good?

Here is what happens. When you subscribe, they provide you a report page which they contend is a report from google showing the referrals each day to your website, however, this is not a google report. When you check your own google analytics, the true referral rate is just 5% of this amount.

Further to sending a fraction of the leads they claim to your website, the bounce rate of the visitors they send is 90%. That is most never get past the first page. The small amount of traffic they refer is worthless.

What do OnlineTech say about this? Nothing. They don’t reply to emails, and their Help Desk goes unanswered.

The second part of the scam is their billing practice. They offer a one month trial at 10% of the full amount, after which you are automatically charged the full amount. That is, you have a month to decide whether you like the service or not at a trial rate. Fair enough.

However, if you decide that their service is worthless, you can’t cancel it. OnlineTech don’t respond to any emails, or any of their contact forms on their website. They also don’t provide a phone number. They do provide an address, but there is no way to know if it’s genuine, but it appears residential. The only way to cancel their service is to contact your credit card supplier.

This is a scam. I won’t provide a link to their website, but if you google Onlinetech Australia you will find it.

4 comments
:

We have had a similar experience. With little or no support from them.We experienced staggered periods of low traffic as per simply customers Google report.They attribute downtime is required at times to work on marketing for their clients.

We have recently cancelled the subscription with them.

Fortunately we were paying for our monthly subcription with them through paypal ,which allowed us to cancel the direct debit on our card.

This is a scam, i have been trying to contact them for 2 weeks and have not received any correspondence from them. I have submitted help tickets time and time again and get no response. My fault really for not doing my research on them first. I hope no one else gets scammed by these people.